22 Product Photography Apps and Software Programs for eCommerce

August 29, 2017 - Josh

In the last few years, there have been an abundance of new photography apps, photography software and website resources to help you at every stage of your product photography. It’s hard to keep track of both what’s available to you and what each resource does.

So today, we have collected 22 resources that can help you create better product photography and organized them based on how they can help. From collecting stock images, to finding apps to help you take better photos, and editing software for post-production, there is something here to help everyone improve their product photography on their eCommerce store.

Stock Photos

Sometimes you need a good-quality stock image as the base for a product photo or banner image. These websites feature some of the best stock photography for eCommerce entrepreneurs.

Burst is a photography website powered by Shopify themselves! The idea behind Burst is to provide copyright-free images that are particularly relevant to eCommerce entrepreneurs.

This means they feature photos involving some of the most popular and trending product categories such as coffee and iPhone accessories. But they also have more general collections that will be useful for your social media marketing or to just fill out your site while you’re getting started.

Unsplash is a fantastic resource of free, high-resolution photos with almost 2 billion photos viewed on the site every month. The website is super easy to navigate and is broken down into easy-to-navigate collections. Their collections make it super easy to find photos relevant to what you want. The website is frequently updated, which means they tend to not be as overused and generic as other stock images.

Unsplash has a great range of photos that will suit people from many different fields. But their catalog does cater somewhat to digital marketing, creatives and people within tech. Of their audience :

31% are in management

24% are in creative

28% are in tech

20% have a post-graduate degree

75% are aged 18 – 34

If you fit into any of these demographics, there’s a good chance Unsplash will have photos you’re looking for.

Pairing your camera with the right app can take your photography to the next level. While these apps can help, remember to go easy on the filters and editing. Customers want to see what the product will look like when they buy it, not what it will look like on Instagram.

Using this all-in-one app from Adobe, you can snap the perfect photo, crop it down and make basic edits to get the colors just right. The app supports a wide range of image formats and lets you make all the essential edits you need to take a basic product photo.

You can also share the images with your audience straight from the app to help build awareness of your product before launching it.

Sometimes, you just need a little bit of extra control over your iPhone’s settings to get the photo just right. Camera+ provides access to focus and exposure settings, as well as a ton of presets, to make shooting high-quality photos quick and easy.

For certain products, people want to see what the product looks like on an actual person. But photographing products with people presents its own challenges.

Facetune lets you take professional-looking photos of people modeling your products without any expensive equipment or software. Like filters, you don’t want to go overboard, but it can give your product photos a more professional edge where appropriate.

Photo Editing

So you have your product photos taken, but they aren’t quite ready to go live on your website yet. Maybe they aren’t the right size or need some adjustments to bring them up to a professional level. Having inconsistent or poorly-optimized images can make browsing your website a painful experience.

This list of photo editing software goes beyond Photoshop to cover a range of free and paid tools that will help you edit your product photography and get it retail-ready.

Our own service, Pixc, has helped thousands of stores with their photo-editing needs. Pixc automates the tedious photo-editing process for you. We get your product photos retail-ready by removing the background from images and optimizing them for your eCommerce store. Your images are edited and returned all within 24 hours!

Lightroom allows you to take high-quality photos and edit them anywhere using your desktop or mobile device. Their seamless syncing between devices means you can take photos using a DSLR or smartphone, upload them, and have them ready to organize and edit anywhere. Use your tablet to apply powerful filter presets or make custom edits to your photos on the go.

For photos involving models, Portrait Professional can help you airbrush and retouch your photos in minutes. The software can help you achieve certain stylistic looks, such as glamor shots, or address specific problems in your photos, such as lighting or color correction.

The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is an open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop for Mac, Windows and Linux users. Being open source means it is completely free for you to download and use.

The UI might not always be as slick as Photoshop, but if you need a more advanced photo-editor without the Adobe price tag, or just want to try out photo editing, GIMP is a fantastic resource. Check out their tutorials section to see ways you can use GIMP for your product photo editing.

Even though I have Photoshop, Sketch and numerous other image editing apps installed, I find myself using the Pixlr online photo editor on a regular basis.

Pixlr isn’t as feature rich or intuitive as native applications like Photoshop, but there is a lot to be said for having a powerful photo-editor readily available anywhere you have an internet browser. For simple edits like resizing and cropping, Pixlr is a great tool to have up your sleeve.

Canva is a surprisingly slick image editor that is focused more on creating promotional images like banners and flyers. But it’s features are still great for combining photos and putting together images on the fly.

Canva has a range of great features available for free that let you create professional images for your eCommerce store and share your images among your team for later use.

Photography Services

Maybe you don’t have the need to hire a professional photographer full-time? Thankfully, there are still a range of services that can help you achieve retail-ready, professional product photography, without having an in-house photographer or designer. The benefit of these services is that they can scale up or down with your business as needed.

Fiverr originally started as a place to get small jobs done for $5. While the services offered now will often go beyond $5, you can still find talented people willing to do quick and simple tasks for a reasonable price.

It might be a cliché, but Snappr really is like the Uber for photography. They provide you with pre-vetted photographers for any type of photography you need. You tell them the time, place and type of photography you need, and Snappr provides you with the talent.

If you’re using the Shopify platform, Shopify has a curated directory of photography experts ready to help out. By hiring a Shopify expert, you know you will be working with someone vetted by Shopify who has partnered with the platform and who has also worked with Shopify stores in the past.

Photo Management

Once all of your product photos are done, you’re often left with a library full of photographs. Aside from taking up a ton of room, you’ll often have a mix of raw and professionally-edited photos that need to be organized.

These tools help you manage your product photography and ensure they will be readily available for you to use again.

Photoshop elements is a photo organizing and editing tool from Adobe that lets you keep track of all your photos with tags, events and locations. For the price, it is a powerful software tool that also includes the ability to edit photos individually and in batches.

If you’re using a smartphone to take your product photos you’ll likely end up with an album full of duplicate and similar photos trying to get that perfect shot.

SlideBox is handy application available for iOS and Android that lets you swipe your photos to delete or organize them into folders. It has a ton of other features that are handy for product photography as well, like the ability to detect and compare similar photos.

This simple cloud hosting service is a favorite for photo hosting and organization for a reason. Dropbox is an easy-to-use tool that offers numerous benefits over trying to save and organize your files locally, such as:

Being able to share images and folders with a link instead of emailing

With Google Photos, Google has provided their own cloud solution for storing and organizing your photos. Having your images hosted in the cloud means more space available on your computer and your photos are accessible anywhere, including their iOS and Android apps.

It’s also free for you to upload as many photos and videos to Google Photos as you like!

Their smart assistant already helps you keep your images organized, and with Google’s investments into AI, machine learning and image recognition, we might see some interesting features come out of Google Photos in the near future.

With new apps and software coming out every day, the list of photography tools that can help you improve arguably the most important aspect of your eCommerce business – your product photography – continues to grow.